About Photomatter Blog

Photomatter Blog is an extension of Photomatter.com's Photography web site featuring photos by James Markus. The blog will focus on photography, business practices, equipment, new photographic creations, important photographic news/information, recent work, and my occasional posts.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Sam had great fun striking matches for that last shoot, and I ended up with three boxes of kitchen matches. What to do with that many matches has been on my mind. I've decided to add another series to my other image series. This image - titled "Tipped" is for the theme Standing Out from the Crowd, and will go along with the interaction image of "Striker and Match".

Sunday, May 9, 2010

FM (Fred Miranda) has weekly and monthly assignments that I find help keep my creativity flowing. Over the last couple years i have found that participating in these assignments has spurred me to produce some of my favorite images. Here is this weeks entry under the theme of "Interaction".

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Three years ago I joined Photographer's Direct, and was happy to find Chris Barton - its founder.

The photo industry is in turmoil, with giants like Getty taking advantage of it's size to screw photographers, and swallow competitors. Though that is another story, a related one is the lowering of image quality in advertising, and marketing caused by the above practices. In addition to this, there is a culture shift occurring with corporations, ad agencies, and mom and pop businesses using micro stock images - not realizing what this says about their business, or the strange bedfellows they make by sharing an image with unrelated business. Chris has written two important articles on his blog that should be must reads by corporate photo buyers, ad agencies, and any commercial photo buying client. There is an amazing free tool to help you in checking your photo choices that you will find in the second article. Please read Chris' "Microstock: why would a reputable company do this to themselves?"

In this Chris Barton article you will learn how to avoid the mistake of buying cheap low quality photos, and how to determine where and how many times the same photo has been used. If you are looking for a corporate identifying image - this is vital information.